Page 8 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1
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I  walked  awestruck  for  days  afterward,  through  cities
            broken by raw, violent revelation. Diffusing like smoke, the
            dead, dying, sick, and insane choked streets and alleyways,
            filled  skyscrapers  repurposed  to  madhouses,  and  tumbled
            into graves as deep and wide as canyons. I wandered for
            weeks through  the  fallout  of the  global  nightmare,  my
            family and I marveling at the new-world absurdities, living
            beneath a sky that had indeed proven capable of falling. I
            only  watched—approvingly,  I  confess—as  mankind,  on  a
            scale never known, collapsed beneath the combined weight
            of truth and mystery.
               Religions  burned to the ground almost  overnight, as
            neither gods  nor their books could ever again be trusted.
            Science fell to the gutters, wasted to bones, starved thin and
            wan for lack of sustaining facts and figures. Collective man
            was naked beneath the moon once more. To be sure, it was
            many years before mankind recovered some measure of its
            former contrivances and doldrums, but even then it walked
            a doubtful path between the tombstones of that lost year, the
            year of the Great Darkness.
               There is darkness in everything, I have since concluded.
            The  explicit  variety  that  falls  from  the  sky at  night  may
            be perhaps a sort of externalized  counterpart of the more
            metaphysical brand that lurks the other side of our skin. I
            believe it was the joining of these two types, indeed their
            fusion, which led to the Great Darkness of 1999. This union
            resulted in nothing less than the construction of a Dream—
            where mind  and matter  conspire to supplant  reality. And
            while  no one remembers  precisely  what happened  during
            our year-long blackout (forgetfulness has always been the
            bane of dreams), its echo still plays out across the world,
            tolling a dissonance of broken faiths—in solid worlds, and
            even the prospect of certain spiritual enterprises.
               It was this metaphysical darkness—the kind slinking just
            out of sight, more wondrous than its traditional counterpart—
            that  I’d  always  shared  a  special  kinship.  Along  with  its
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